Now that school is done for the 2009-2010 year, I’m back at it in Neuvoo again. I’m finishing off a long-planned and fairly major addition to portage I call “portage hooks.” The fun thing is I’ve submitted some patches to zmedico and the response has actually been more positive than previous experiences. solar seemed to be (tentatively?) liking the idea as well.
So, here’s what portage hooks are all about. If you have portage-utils installed, you will have an /etc/portage/postsync.d/ directory. Scripts in this directory are executed after portage syncs the tree. I thought this was a great idea, and I thought it should be expanded so there are other opportunities for unofficial extensions. Continue reading →
I have a new project now. It’s called Gentoo for Pandora. It’s pretty easy to figure out what it’s all about, but I’ll summarize for those who don’t know:
Gentoo is a distributon of Linux, and it features a very flexible, very powerful package system called portage (though some would say otherwise). Gentoo’s recommended installation media doesn’t actually install anything for you, either. The entire system is all about customizing everything to your needs, which means you can leave out extra junk you know you’ll never use. Gentoo also practices “rolling updates”, which means there’s no “Gentoo v1” or “Gentoo v2”. There’s just “Gentoo”, and whether or not you’re behind is determined by whether or not you’ve updated recently. This means that you’re always up-to-date, and never have to do a time-consuming upgrade that Ubuntu requires every six months.
Now, there are problems with using Gentoo on a handheld. Continue reading →
The supply of time has been continually decreasing at the same time demand is increasing. I’m talking about the combination of holidays, deadlines at work, and other such nuisances revolving around a rather ingenious concept called real life.
When it comes to time restricting some of my more fun activities, I generally drop into sarcasm. But I’ve gotten it out of my system now (that’s what blogs are for, right?) so I can carry on writing the rest of this post in all due seriousness. Continue reading →
Wow, I can breathe again. I used to be loaded down with so many projects, but they all just vaporized in various ways:
- Freeniverse: I may start this up again, but I said enough is enough about three months ago and canceled this project.
- Class-management software (written in PHP): just finished.
- MMORPGM: Redundant, it’s already been done by Novashell.
- MediaMaster Downloader: well, alright, not quite done, but just about there. A few more tweaks/features and it’ll be usable
All of these were haunting me at once, crying out for my attention. Now that these are all pretty much done, I can relax. In fact, I haven’t relaxed this much in a few years!
Coincidentally, just as my time is freeing up, a new PHP project for webmail software that actually works like you want it to appeared, and I accepted. It’s a brilliant idea, and I need at least one project to keep me happy.
If that coincidence wasn’t enough, another friend contacted me and asked me if I’d like to help on their project titled Socrates. Can you see the black time-killing whirlpool forming already? I said no, but I might submit a patch or two for the bugs that appeared in their bug tracking system. I’ve got to be careful, or else I’ll be back into the project-juggling thing again.
I’ve decided I really need to move away from Java programming (which I am now, in my opinion, thoroughly learned enough in at this point) and move into C/C++ programming. I’ve started with a little OSS Linux project meant to compete with RPG Maker XP. It’s going to be an interesting dive: I’ll be submerged into music, tileset-based graphics, and other such things all at once.
Will I survive? Time will tell!
My Humble Corner 